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Wrong about Human Rights

When we think of human-rights problems, most of us imagine
arbitrary arrests, political repression, religious persecution,
torture, show trials, censorship, and the like. In America, we
don’t often have those kinds of problems. Even the current
controversy over an Islamic center near ground zero isn’t about the
right to build there; it’s about the wisdom of doing so.

All of which made it surprising to learn from the Obama State
Department that America does indeed have human-rights problems.

The news came last week in the form of our first report on U.S.
human-rights conditions to the U.N. Human Rights Council, submitted
pursuant to a U.N. mandate that members conduct self-assessments
every four years. According to the State Department, we fall short
on “fairness, equality, and dignity” in areas such as education,
health, and housing, especially when it comes to women, blacks,
Latinos, Muslims, South Asians, American Indians, and gay
people.

On closer reading, however, the claimed “human rights” problems
start to look dubious. Take the report’s contention that “work
remains to meet our goal of ensuring equality before the law”
— a human right, to be sure. The supposed evidence is that
unemployment is higher among blacks and Hispanics; there are racial
and ethnic disparities in home ownership rates; and “whites are
twice as likely as Native Americans to have a college degree.” But
those are socio-economic inequalities owing to many factors, not
inequalities before the law.

Or consider this point: “Asian-American men suffer from stomach
cancer 114 percent more often than non-Hispanic white men.” That’s
a human-rights problem?

So what’s going on here? A little background will be useful.
Founded on the ashes of the Second World War, the United Nations
assumed as one of its gravest missions the protection of human
rights. Toward that end, however, its declaration on the subject
cobbled together both real and spurious “rights.”

Hence the United Nations’ two main rights covenants: one on
civil and political rights — those any American would
recognize — to which the United States is a party; and the
other on economic, social, and cultural “rights” commonly
recognized by European welfare states, which the United States
signed but the U.S. Senate has never ratified.

The Carter administration was less than adept at defending
America against Soviet charges that we failed to protect the second
class of “rights.” By contrast, the Reagan administration showed
that the United States not only protected real rights, but in doing
so afforded American citizens far more of the results that the
Soviets purported to be providing their citizens as rights.
Moreover, President Ronald Reagan went on the offensive, using the
U.N. Commission on Human Rights as a forum for public diplomacy
against some of the worst regimes of the Cold War, including the
Soviet Union.

With the end of the Cold War, however, the lines between the two
kinds of rights grew blurry. What’s more, “human rights” became
just another club to be wielded for political ends by human-rights
abusers who sat on the commission, often targeting Israel and
America.

When it got so bad that Sudan, deep into its ethnic cleansing of
Darfur, was elected unanimously to the Commission on Human Rights
in 2004, the U.S. ambassador walked out. But things got even worse,
and the commission was abolished two years later — only to be
reconstituted as the U.N. Human Rights Council, whose members today
include such human-rights exemplars as Russia, China, Saudi Arabia,
Libya, and Cuba.

Just last year, however, the United States joined the council as
part of President Obama’s outreach to the world. But in doing so
and being required to produce last week’s report, we’ve implicitly
sanctioned the conflation of real and supposed rights, even as the
Senate has declined for decades to ratify the International
Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Moreover, the
report reads like a politically correct campaign brochure, touting
everything from stimulus spending to Obamacare as promoting human
rights, which renders the idea boundless and therefore
meaningless.

History has shown that nations that promise everything as a
matter of rights have provided little but the oppression required
by that misconceived goal. We should not abandon a distinction at
the core of our political order that has enabled us to be both free
and prosperous — much less do so in the good name of human
rights.

Roger Pilon is vice president for
legal affairs at the Cato Institute. He served in the Reagan
administration as, among other things, director of policy for the
State Department’s Bureau of Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs.